Date 8/98

Viewpoint on WEB Virtual Center Development Strategy

by JOZEF GOETZ   

 I can imagine that the WEB Virtual Center can be a composition of

1. WEB Info Center
2. WEB Call Center
3. WEB Self-help Center

Any company would open an account for their agents and supervisors. The WEB Virtual Call Center can be supported by alive agents registered via WEB. The supervisors, depends on privileges, of the given company would have access to the configuration screens to setup the agents in groups, to view different performance statistics of agents and groups.

Note. Further a call can be literally a call or e-mail or even a fax.

I believe that there are following stages of the WEB Center development for an end to end open solution.
I would like to be involved in some of them.

1) Identify business and technical requirements and goals.

          2) Define the customer and management expectations.

3) Define the WEB Center internal and external metrics (what gets measured gets managed).

4) Define key competitors and evaluate their metrics.

5) Evaluate available technology.

6) Define the technical, customer and economical criteria, in particular, call flows and work flows, resource utilization, staffing levels, scheduling staff, tracking and monitoring performance, custom satisfaction, speed of answer, operational costs, ROI and etc.

7) In the above criteria, prioritize which metrics are the most relevant.

8) Investigate and evaluate software and hardware infrastructure solutions, communication model, application development and configuration tools, workflow integrated development  to construct the  flow diagram of the call process.

9) Develop, implement and test WEB Center subsystems, In particular, the workflow processor, multimedia and voice call routing, predictive dialing, IVR, fax, e-mail, voice and video mail, video conference, e-commerce, white board, real-time chat, agent performance track, call center statistics, multimedia and voice call tracking, agent monitoring, WEB phone, WEB meeting, remote diagnostics, automated WEB site, call back, screen pops, customized reports, speech recognition and etc.

10) Architect the call flows dynamically for the single and multiple site WEB Center by :

a) knowing who the caller is before handling and routing the call
          dynamically, balancing calls among geographically distributed call centers and

      b) integrating appropriate levels of automation,

c)  making decision  based on the following parameters:

• the customer parameters: customer business and call profile including minimum skills required, ANI, DNIS, database look-ups values
• the agent parameters: agent percent allocation in each skill, least occupied agent, agent level skill assignment including skill preference and  follow me service
• the call center parameters: actual service level with reserve agents and expected wait time in skill queues calculated based on actual agents staffed; actual average speeds of response, actual (current) queue lengths, call handling times, call arrive rate, abandon rates, priority levels of calls and agents, queuing split and agent in multiple skill groups. The  expected wait time can be calculated for available call center sites in order to determine which site is most likely to have the next available agents

d) evaluating of  each waiting call and every available agent in
      order to select the "best" service routing. There are following approaches:

• caller with the "best" available agent .. (For example, the caller wants to talk to the agent who best matches the caller's requirements. Or,  the caller is matched with  an agent who is least occupied.)
• "best" caller for an available agent .. (For example,  the system selects the  caller  based on the agent's skills.)
• "best" caller-agent match. The goal of the approach is to minimize  the caller's  wait time, abandoned call rate, network cost, etc. This approach is based on any of the customer, agent and call center parameters.

            e) linking disparate platforms to create a virtual call center.

11) Design and integrate the infrastructure to meet technical and
       economical criteria.

12) Identify the key bottlenecks and specify adjustment of the WEB
      Center according to the hierarchy of metrics importance.

13) Architect predictive dialing based on call volume and staffing
       skills to meet the goals of high productivity and good service.

14) Configure the forecast and simulate  the subsystems for the
      adjustment or verification of the WEB Center performance.

          15) Develop, implement and test the WEB Center integration of
                subsystems.

16) Specify, design, develop, implement and test multiple site
       WEB Centers (items 1 – 15).

One of the most important part of the WEB Virtual Call Center is the functionality provided to the end customer.
Humanize Your WEB Site [Call Center Solution-July 1999] article introduces the end customer functionality aspect of the WEB enabled Call Center as follows:

 A - Call-Me Buttons - these offer the cyber browser a button to click on to schedule a callback from an agent;

 B - Text Chat - these products offer the chance to initiate a text chat session with an agent while the customer is still on your Web page;

C - E-mail Management/Automatic Response Systems - these help you control  the overwhelming flood of e-mail in an orderly fashion and can offer autoreply e-mail based on the content of the incoming e-mail or offer suggested replies to the agent;

D - Web Self-Service Solutions - offer the online customer the tools and knowledgebase access to find answers to their own questions without human intervention;

E - Screen Synchronization/Push Technology -gives the agent the ability to see where the customer is on the company Web site and send pages to the customer, in other words, the agent and the customer are on the same page;

F - Web Callthrough - provides the technology through Internet telephony or voice over Internet Protocol to allow the agent to speak with the customer through multimedia PCs while the customer is still online;

G - Data-Wake/Clickstream Analysis - presents the agent with a record of where on the corporate Web site the customer has been and can also be used for analysis for later fine-tuning of Web pages and marketing campaigns.